The Applicant company has already described, in its French patent application published under the No. 2 728 846, a device for fastening or putting into position the corner fairing of a bumper on the front fender of a motor vehicle.
For each bumper fairing, such a device comprises an inwardly-directed plane top rim and, beneath the front bottom edge of the fender, a housing for said rim, the thickness of the housing being substantially equal to or slightly greater than the thickness of said rim, a window being formed in the rim of the bumper fairing and a resilient tongue being provided in the thickness of the housing to penetrate into said window when the bumper is in position, and to hold the rim in the housing.
The device described in that prior application has pairs of reference surfaces and of reference-engaging surfaces, and an abutment surface and an abutment-engaging surface which enable the fairings of the bumper to be accurately positioned merely by being moved in translation towards the rear of the vehicle.
In that prior device, the rim of the fairing can move in the housing only in translation towards the front or the rear of the vehicle, and that gives rise to two difficulties when implementing that known fastening device.
Firstly, bumpers can be dismantled only by movement in translation towards the front thereof, and that is not always possible if the vehicle has suffered a collision, yet collision is the main reason why bumpers are replaced.
Furthermore, installing bumpers by moving them in translation towards the rear requires the bumper fairings to be accurately in alignment with the housings provided in the fenders, and in practice this condition is rarely satisfied because bumpers coming from a manufacturing line are subjected to internal stresses that cause them to twist, so that their fairings move towards each other or move apart.